AJ and I went on a super cleaning binge this morning. I handed him my favorite feather duster, grabbed some Windex, and turned on some music and we grooved our way around the house, laughing hysterically. We played the hokey pokey while dusting. Then I chased him around the house with the vacuum cleaner while he ran shrieking. I�m not sure if it is the most thorough housecleaning job ever, but it was certainly the most fun.

We celebrated our work by a trip to what AJ refers to as The Fancy Playground, where we found scads of children who had apparently been standing around waiting for AJ to come and play with them. He was quickly dragged into games of follow-the-leader, tag, swing contests and slide races. Then an older boy (perhaps 8 or 9) started giving the littler kids rides on a tire swing that spins around. He referred to it as �The Tornado of Terror,� and indeed it seemed to elicit screams from the mouths of the children who dared to take a ride from the second they got on. AJ wisely passed on that particular ride, choosing instead to follow around the park district workers who were making repairs to the playground, occasionally picking up a stick to bang helpfully on invisible nails.

This afternoon the real work begins, as I attempt to polish off my chapter and start in on my conference paper. I want to have a solid chunk done by Thursday when I need to beg the symphony archive to let me have a video cassette of the film I discovered last week. I am trying not too hard about the birthday looming ahead at the end of the week. I am not usually bothered by birthdays, and in fact generally enjoy them greatly. But for some reason this one is serving to remind me of how little I feel I�ve accomplished of late. I need to finish something.

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